Zenawi: The good, bad and ugly faces of African power

An Ethiopian Christian Orthodox Church priest attends the official state funeral of Zenawi last week. PHOTO BY AFP

By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBOPosted Sunday, September 9 2012 at 01:00

In Summary

Series. In the next article, we examine the inefficiencies of Zenawi-style iron fisted rule, and why the “authoritarian bargain”, where citizens give up their freedoms for economic development and food, is nonsensical in Africa

When Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died on August 20, he took not just a secret about him, but about other strongmen-cum-reformist Africans.
That secret is why they resort to pulling fingernails and become intolerant of dissident, when they don’t have to and could do much better with a more liberal and democratic approach?

For nearly three weeks before Zenawi’s death, the Internet had been abuzz with gleeful claims that he had passed away in a Belgian hospital. And when it was officially announced that he had fallen, there was no shortage of his many enemies celebrating his death.

I met Zenawi for the first, and last, time in early March of 2006. There had been hotly contested elections in March 2005. The opposition accused Zenawi and his ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition of a massive theft of the vote. There were protests allover the country, with the most violent ones being in the capital Addis Ababa.

Zenawi cracked down a vengeance that shocked his international allies, and horrified many Ethiopians. He pulled pages out from the darkest days of Ethiopia’s murderous military junta leader Mengistu Haile Mariam. Nearly 100 people were killed. I was part of a delegation put together by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists to travel to Ethiopia to plead for the many journalists who had been arrested in the crackdown, and charged with treason!

We met Serkalem Fassil then a 26-year-old beautiful Ethiopian woman. She was, officially, publisher of the Asqual, Menelik, and Sanetaw titles. She was five months pregnant, and had been in prison since November 2005. Eskinder Nega, her fiancé, had been in and out of prison seven times in past few years. He was the real power behind Asqual, Menelik and Senataw, but put Serkalem’s name on the titles as publisher because she was less controversial.

Scary place
Eskinder was in jail too. Eskinder and Serkalem were both being held at the Kaliti Prison on the outskirts of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Kaliti was then a sprawling prison. In the hot season, according to prisoners’ accounts, the cells turned into a sauna. In the cold season, they became an ice box.
Until the week when we went to Addis Ababa, Eskinder and Serkalem hadn’t been allowed to visit each other. That, however, was not their main concern. Their biggest fear would be their child, their first, will be born in prison. They were among the nearly 27 journalists arrested in a crackdown on the independent media in the wake of the protests.

In addition to the journalists, over 100 opposition politicians, NGO activists, lawyers, and trade union leaders had also been arrested and charged with conspiracy to overthrow the constitutional order and to commit genocide and other serious crimes for which punishment ranges from 15 years in prison to death. Eskinder and Serkalem were likely to spend the rest of their lives behind bars – if they survived the hangman’s noose.

Ethiopia then, as today, was a very scary place to be a journalist. At that point, if you threw in other cases of journalists who had been arrested over cases unrelated to the post-election fallout, Ethiopia had the highest number of journalists in prison in Africa, and the third highest in the world after China and Cuba. Many had – continued – to flee into exile.

It’s a situation that seemed unlikely even in the final days of the campaigns in May 2005. At that time the government gave the opposition unprecedented access to state broadcast media. On weekends, they got as high as four hours of airtime.
While up to 2001 the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi had again been one of the leading jailers of journalists in the world, it improved its record dramatically and opened 2005 with hardly any in prison.

Sleepy city
Then hell broke loose. For example, partly because the opposition used text messaging to deadly effect to organise, the government banned short messaging service, and the restrictions were still in place when we arrived…and left. The irony though, was that despite the crackdown, Ethiopia still had the freest press in the Horn of Africa, testimony to how desperate conditions for journalists were and remain in the region.

A lot of the bad stuff seemed odd, given the changes that had taken place under the Meles’ government, and indeed continued to his death. Ethiopia had just pulled off what most African countries outside South Africa struggle to accomplish – it had completed new runways and a world class airport at Bole. Even at that point, the drive to the south-western city of Nazareth would have been a humbling experience for many other Africans from misruled countries.

The Meles government had done, and continued to do, impressive work on rebuilding infrastructure, and a credible industrial economy was already taking form, far ahead of other countries on the continent where the big industries are the ones that make curry powder and plastic chairs.

The feverish building boom that has today transformed Addis Ababa from a sleepy ramshackle city of past years was one. One Ethiopian observer was so carried away then and claimed that more housing had come up in Ethiopia in the last 10 years, than in the past 100!

And Zenawi’s ministers weren’t the unremarkable type you tend to find in Africa; he seemed to pick the best. In some ways, that was bad news for the independent press and opposition, because it meant they were up against a government side that was quite accomplished at framing its arguments – whether you agreed or disagreed with them. And even after hearing that PM Meles is one of the most articulate African leaders, I was still struck by how brilliant he was when we met him.

Protocol
In recent years, Zenawi’s Ethipiopia – and President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda – were the only two African countries to meet the target of increasing agricultural production by 6-8 per cent. The two also have the continent’s most impressive record in reducing malaria infections.

Yet all those changes failed to produce the natural result in Ethiopia – a long term expansion of freedom and democratic space. Instead, the opposite happened.
On the third day after our arrival in Ethiopia, our delegation was informed that in addition to meeting Justice minister Assefa Kessito and his minister of State, the sharp-suited and cerebral Dr Hashim Tewfik, and the State Prosecutor the next day, we had also been granted access to Kaliti prison to talk to journalists.

Then the big one: Prime Minister Zenawi would meet us later in the evening. It was only the third visit by foreigners that the Ethiopian government had allowed to the prison to meet the November prisoners, and the only one whose member of the group that had been allowed was permitted to inspect the living conditions of the female prison.

A protocol officer was on time with a car to drive us to Kaliti. In a striking similarity with Rwanda, everything went with clockwork efficiency.
The prisoners confirmed information we had been told that they were not being allowed books. Eskinder Nega was literarily in tears about his pregnant fiancé Fassil, desperately pleading that he would do anything, and accept any condition, for her to be released or granted bail.

Serkalam wasn’t alone. A pregnant Internet journalist, Ferezer Negash, was also being held at an Addis Ababa police station, although she hadn’t been formally charged in court. She had been granted bail on that third day after our arrival, but the police refused to release her.

We raised the issue with government ministers, and were told that if the courts had released Ferezer, then the decision should be respected. The next day, Ferezer walked, but police continued investigations in her case.

Having been in the dock over 100 times myself while I was Managing Editor of The Monitor in Uganda, I felt a little despair. Unlike me, none of the Ethiopian journalists had the money to hire the lawyers to do a fair battle against a government that, obviously, did its homework.

Eventually, the hour for the meeting with Mr Zenawi arrived. All of us in the delegation had all met a few prime ministers and presidents, but we were caught out by Meles.

We drove from Kaliti Prison straight to Zenawi’s office. At the gate, they didn’t ask for our IDs, or check us.

————————————————Meeting zenawi

The PM’s protocol officer met us, and led us up red carpet-laid stairs. The cameras of the state TV and newspaper were at hand to do the honours. We entered a reception room where we were joined also immediately by Fesseha Tesfu, a powerful senior official at the Ministry of Foreigns Affairs, a self-effacing man and staunch ally of Meles. At that point, he had held his position for 14 years.After about 10 minutes we were ushered into Meles’ lounge, where he was waiting. There had been no identity or security checks, nor was there a bodyguard in sight from the time we were waved through the gate.

Given the political tensions, especially in Addis, I had expected to find a paranoid Meles court feeling under siege. No such thing. Later, Meles gave us a hint about why he felt so confident, by explaining that his and the EPRDF’s view had always been that the opposition-led post-election protests didn’t pose “an existential threat” to the government. That the government responded with force, not because it felt a threat to its control, but only to stop the deaths and destruction of property.

Several people warned us to “beware of the charm” of Meles before we went to him; something he had in common with his “new breed” African leaders like Uganda’s President Museveni then.

So we immunised ourselves against being swept off our feet. We soon confirmed something else that not many people had told us, but we had had the wisdom to anticipate: Before you met Meles, you did well to stay up late grasping your subject, and working out a clever strategy for confronting. Otherwise he would reduce you to pieces.

Having formed a very negative impression of him from his grim public countenance, I was surprised that Meles had a sense of humour and actually did smile a lot in private. And, unlike other leaders who talk about themselves and “my” government, Meles was scrupulously careful to speak about “we” in cabinet, government or the party. He also went to great trouble to give the impression that he couldn’t grant you a wish or request using his power as PM.

I was puzzled. There was a Zenawi who seemed to have everything to create a democracy and leave a great legacy. Yet, for many in Ethiopia, he was nothing more than a vindictive dictator and Tigrayan tribal warlord